Rauschning’s nihilism thesis was the most influential émigré interpretation of Nazism in America.

Evidence

Emil Lederer’s State of the Masses, published posthumously in 1940, began with the sentence Modern dictatorship is neither a last-ditch defence of capitalism . . . nor a revolt by the middle classes against their decline.' He regarded the totalitarian dictatorships as an abolition of history’. This was a romantic, apocalyptic view most effectively represented by Hermann Rauschning, who had been a leading Nazi and President of Danzig until 1936, when he broke with Hitler. Rauschning saw Nazism as a `revolution of nihilism’. His book of this title, published in German in 1938 in Zurich and in English in New York a year later, became, together with his Voice of Destruction, published in 1940, the most successful and influential interpretation of Nazism by an émigré in the USA. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1067

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how much did the apocalyptic/`revolution of nihilism’ frame shape postwar American social science against the Frankfurt School’s capitalist analysis?
• SHARE: A Hermann Rauschning or fascism-studies specialist would appreciate this counterpoint — a top Nazi presidency of Danzig became the USA’s most-cited interpreter of Nazism.